Photo: Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
he Cold War was in full heat when vice president Richard Nixon clashed with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in July 1959. In the tiff immortalized as the Kitchen Debate, Khrushchev jeered at the gadgetry inside the exhibit’s “miracle kitchen,” which was built to show what any American could afford. Nixon parried that it was better to compete with dishwashers than doomsday machines. Declassified documents later revealed the U.S. government thought the show was “the most productive psychological effort ever launched ... in any Communist country.”
he Cold War was in full heat when vice president Richard Nixon clashed with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in July 1959. In the tiff immortalized as the Kitchen Debate, Khrushchev jeered at the gadgetry inside the exhibit’s “miracle kitchen,” which was built to show what any American could afford. Nixon parried that it was better to compete with dishwashers than doomsday machines. Declassified documents later revealed the U.S. government thought the show was “the most productive psychological effort ever launched ... in any Communist country.”